In circumstances like these, when the outcome was so blindingly obvious, every hour this senseless fighting was prolonged was a crime. So what were the plans of the German side at this time? It was only later, when it was all over, that it was possible to dig down and answer that question.
Hitler’s adjutant, SS Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche, captured on 2 May in the Schultheis Brewery and interrogated at the main Smersh intelligence directorate of the general staff, gave the following written answer.[1] On 22 April, as artillery shells were falling in central Berlin, a meeting of the supreme command, chaired by Hitler, was held at 16.30 hrs.
The Führer had in mind for the Ninth Army to attack in a northwesterly direction, and for the army group of SS General Steiner to attack in a southerly direction. He was counting on driving back the breakthrough by Russian forces, which he believed to be weak, and for our main forces to reach Berlin and thereby create a new front. The front would then run approximately from Stettin up the River Oder to Frankfurt-on-Oder, then in a westerly direction through Fürstenwalde, Zossen and Treuenbrietzen to the River Elbe.
The preconditions for this were:
1. To hold the front line on the lower reaches of the Oder at all costs.
2. For the Americans to remain on the west bank of the Elbe.
3. For the left flank of the Ninth Army, stationed on the Oder, to hold at all costs.
After Chief of the Army General Staff General Krebs reported a major breakthrough by Russian forces of the front to the south of Stettin, it must have been clear to the Führer that it was impossible to create the aforementioned front, and he expressed the opinion that in this connection Mecklenburg would also be besieged within a few days by Russian forces. Despite this, however, the Ninth and Twelfth Armies and Steiner’s army group were ordered to mount an offensive towards Berlin.
Günsche wrote this six days after the surrender, hot on the heels of the events described, and with his memory still clear:
On 26 April 45, the last telephone communication lines connecting the city with the outside world ceased to operate. Communication was maintained only by means of radio. However, as a result of incessant bombardment the aerials were damaged, more exactly, they were totally out of action. Reports on the advance or progress of offensives of the above-mentioned three armies arrived in limited numbers. Most often they were delivered to Berlin by a roundabout route. On 28 April 45, Field Marshal Keitel reported the following:
1. The offensive of the Ninth and Twelfth armies had been halted by a strong counter-attack by Russian forces, rendering continuation of the offensive impossible.
2. The army group of SS General Steiner had still not yet arrived.
After that, it became clear to everyone that the fate of Berlin was sealed.
German soldiers were dying in the streets of Berlin. Their orders in these tragic days were to fight fanatically for the Third Reich and they would win! But the Reich already lay in ruins. It had been defeated. They were promised reinforcements, which did not in fact exist. If they were suspected of the least disloyalty or wavering, they were hanged or shot. But whether they were battle-hardened soldiers or ill-trained home guard Volksstürmer, they were mortal.
The German troops totally surrounded by the ring of encirclement continued to be thrown bales of Goebbels’ newspaper, Der Panzerbär (The Armoured Bear, the bear being the coat of arms of Berlin) and ‘newsletters’, deceitful and inflammatory, flattering and threatening.
Here is one of the last, dated 27 Apriclass="underline" Goebbels’ Berliner Frontblatt (The Berlin Front Newssheet).
Bravo, Berliners!
Berlin will remain German! The Führer has announced this to the world, and you, the Berliners, will ensure that his word remains the truth. Bravo, Berliners! Your conduct is exemplary! Continue just as valorously, continue just as stubbornly, without mercy or leniency, and the waves of the Bolsheviks’ assault will crash in vain against you… You will prevail, Berliners. Help is on its way!
This little flysheet reached us on 29 April when we were already near Potsdamer Platz.
We were instructed to head for the area from which the troops of our 3rd Shock Army would attack in the direction of Potsdamer Platz. Early in the morning we proceeded in our adverse terrain vehicle over first one and then another barricade where they had been overturned and crushed by tanks, picking our way amidst mangled rails, timbers and guns. We passed over an anti-tank trench that had been filled in with shattered masonry and empty barrels. The buildings became more frequent, some docked by several storeys, others with only a charred wall remaining, as if it had forgotten to collapse. These were monuments to the fighting that had taken place two days earlier. In places, tanks had ploughed their way through the rubble, and vehicles, of which there were increasing numbers, were diverting on to the trails blazed by the tanks’ caterpillar tracks.
The traffic in the streets of Berlin was being directed by lasses from Smolensk, Kalinin and Ryazan in well-fitting tunics that must surely have been altered by Mrs Buzinska in Poznań. The car came to a stop when the road ahead was impassable. We saw advancing towards us small groups of Frenchmen with their luggage trolleys with the French flag on the side, picking their way through the accumulations of crushed brick, scrap metal and rubble. We waved to each other.
The closer we came to the centre, the more unbreathable the air became. Anyone who was in Berlin in those days will remember that air, acrid and opaque from the fumes and stone dust, and the grittiness of sand in their teeth.
We made our way behind the walls of the ruined buildings. No one was trying to put the fires out. The walls were still smoking, and decorative creepers continued to cling to them with burned paws.
‘Unsere Mauern brachen, unsere Herzen nicht!’ Our walls have broken, but not our hearts, declared a poster above a door that had survived but now led only to darkness and devastation.
Diving out of one basement into another, we encountered German families. They all asked us the same thing: ‘How soon will this nightmare end?’ Hitler declared, ‘If the war should be lost, the German nation must disappear.’ But people, in defiance of the Führer’s will, had no wish to disappear. White sheets and pillowcases were hung from windows.
‘In any house hanging out a white flag, all the men are to be shot.’ Such was Himmler’s order.
It was very difficult to find your way through the city by map reading. We had run out of Russian signs and the German ones had mostly disappeared along with the walls. We resorted to asking directions from people we met in the streets, who were hauling their possessions somewhere.
The signallers could be glimpsed, pulling their cables along behind them. Hay was being transported on a cart, and a moustachioed driver from a Guards regiment was chewing a dry straw. Other straw was being lightly sprinkled over the cratered Berlin roadway. A group of soldiers with submachine guns marched by, one with a bandaged head taking care not to fall behind or become detached from the column.
The coat of a bareheaded elderly woman crossing the road displayed a white armband prominently. She was leading two young children by the hand, a boy and a girl. Both of them, with their hair neatly brushed, had white armbands sewn to their sleeves above the elbow. As she passed us she said loudly, not bothered whether we understood or not, ‘These are orphans. Our house has been bombed. I am taking them to another place. These are orphans… Our house has been bombed…’
1
I found Günsche’s testimony in the archive, File 130: ‘Testimony of Hitler’s personal adjutant, SS Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche, 14 May 1945’. First published in my